Climate and Ag in the news
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Here is a fun tool from the New York Times. You type in your city (there are 3800 possibilities) and see a daily record of high and low temperature and monthly accumulated precipitation, with annotations for records. I have it set to Atlanta but you can easily check your own city. Try it at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/21/world/year-in-weather.html#atl.
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Have you ever watched the International Space Station move overhead? If it flies over about an hour after sunset, you can see the brightly lit ISS move quickly across the sky (assuming not too many clouds, of course). I watched it fly over my head tonight! It was moving fast, crossed the entire sky in…
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The Tampa Bay Times had an interesting column by Jack Payne last week on why it is important to understand why some trees survive hurricanes like Irma and others don’t. If we knew the species that were most resilient or could breed stronger varieties, that might help provide protection against damage to buildings, power lines,…
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The peanut crop in Florida last year suffered a significant decline, and scientists are scratching their heads trying to figure out what caused it. One of the early possibilities discussed was salty water dropped by Hurricane Irma, but the actual causes are most likely a combination of several factors. Bob Kemerait of UGA describes the…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
The Packer noted in a story this week that strong winds in California last fall have affected the crop of lemons harvested by increasing scarring of the skin, which reduced the value of the crop, although the juice quality was otherwise unaffected. Some lemons were also destroyed by the Western wildfires, which were also driven…
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If you love to look at maps, you will be interested in this new GIS-based map of forest cover in the US. This is the latest in a string of GIS-based maps of river basins for various continents, and the author Robert Szucs has been featured for these on this blog and other places in the…
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When I was a kid in Michigan, my grandmother’s yard was filled with sassafras trees. So I was very interested in this article from the USDA about ambrosia beetles, which can kill a sassafras tree in just four weeks. Will milder winters cause the trees I remember from Michigan succumb to ambrosia beetles in the…